This is the first of three interesting papers that appear ahead of print in Current Anthropology. Peter Bellwood reviews the spread of farming across the Pacific from its two sources (China including Taiwan, and the New Guinea highlands).Related:
Current Anthropology http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.1086/658181
Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals
Peter Bellwood
Pacific prehistory (excluding Australia) since 3000 BC reflects the impacts of two source regions for food production: China from the Yangzi southward (including Taiwan) and the western Pacific (especially the New Guinea Highlands). The linguistic (Austronesian, Trans–New Guinea), bioanthropological/human genetic, and Neolithic archaeological records each carry signals of expansion from these two source regions. A combined consideration of the multiregional results within all three disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, and biology) offers a historical perspective that will never be obtained from one discipline or one region alone. The fundamental process of human behavior involved in such expansion—population dispersal linked to increases in human population size—is significant for explaining the early spreads of food production and language families in many parts of the world. This article is concerned mainly with the archaeological record for the expansion of early food producers, Austronesian languages, and Neolithic technologies through Taiwan into the northern Philippines as an early stage in what was to become the greatest dispersal of an ethnolinguistic population in world history before AD 1500.
Link
- Major East-West divide in Indonesian Y chromosomes
- More on geographical divide between Asian and Melanesian types in Indonesia (Cox et al. 2010)
- Demographic history of Oceania (Wollstein et al. 2010)
Current Anthropology http://www.jstor.org/stable/full/10.1086/658181
Holocene Population History in the Pacific Region as a Model for Worldwide Food Producer Dispersals
Peter Bellwood
Pacific prehistory (excluding Australia) since 3000 BC reflects the impacts of two source regions for food production: China from the Yangzi southward (including Taiwan) and the western Pacific (especially the New Guinea Highlands). The linguistic (Austronesian, Trans–New Guinea), bioanthropological/human genetic, and Neolithic archaeological records each carry signals of expansion from these two source regions. A combined consideration of the multiregional results within all three disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, and biology) offers a historical perspective that will never be obtained from one discipline or one region alone. The fundamental process of human behavior involved in such expansion—population dispersal linked to increases in human population size—is significant for explaining the early spreads of food production and language families in many parts of the world. This article is concerned mainly with the archaeological record for the expansion of early food producers, Austronesian languages, and Neolithic technologies through Taiwan into the northern Philippines as an early stage in what was to become the greatest dispersal of an ethnolinguistic population in world history before AD 1500.
Link
"A combined consideration of the multiregional results within all three disciplines (archaeology, linguistics, and biology) offers a historical perspective that will never be obtained from one discipline or one region alone".
ReplyDeleteAnd I believe the perspective that emerges can be applied much more widely when trying to understand other regions where the evidence is more obscure.
"Pacific prehistory (excluding Australia) since 3000 BC reflects the impacts of two source regions for food production: China from the Yangzi southward (including Taiwan) and the western Pacific (especially the New Guinea Highlands)".
The Austronesian-speaking people who moved east from SE Asia were a hybrid population. And I have long claimed that Y-hap O spread 'from the Yangzi southward'. Many have disagreed, but not, apparently, the authors of this paper. I would not necessarily claim a 'New Guinea Highlands' origin for all the other Y-haps. C2, for example, is probably from southern Wallacea.